SIR KENRICK’S ANCESTRAL HOME.
SIR KENRICK CULVERHOUSE had gone to Hampshire to look at the old
domain. He had plenty of friends in the neighbourhood of Culverhouse,
who would have been glad to give him hospitality, but he preferred the
less luxurious accommodation of his own house, which was maintained
by a couple of faithful old servants, very much in the style of the
Master of Ravenswood’s immortal _ménage_ at Wolf’s Craig. The old
butler was not so amusing or so enthusiastic as Caleb Balderstone;
but he was every whit as faithful, and preferred his board wages and
bacon dumplings, in the halls of the good old race, to those fleshpots
of Egypt which he might perchance have found in the service of some
mushroom gentleman or commercial magnate newly established in the
neighbourhood.
People had told Kenrick that he ought to let Culverhouse Castle, and
that he might add considerably to his income by so doing. But Kenrick
repudiated the idea of an income so obtained. To allow purse-proud city
people to come and criticise those old familiar rooms, and make rude
remarks upon the shabbiness of the furniture--to have some newly-made
country squire, whose beginnings were on the Stock Exchange, airing
his unaccustomed grandeur in the rooms where meek Lady Culverhouse had
lived her tranquil unoffending life--no; Kenrick would have starved
rather than sanction such a desecration. His mother’s gentle shadow
still occupied the rooms she had loved. He would not have that peaceful
ghost scared away by horsey young ladies or billiard-playing young men.
At a cost of about a hundred and fifty pounds a year--nearly half his
small income--Kenrick contrived to have the place kept decently; the
gardens free from weeds and ruin; the empty stables protected from wind
and rain; the house preserved from actual decay. And the place was
ready to receive him when he was able to come home, were it but for a
single night. This, in Kenrick’s mind, was much.
Love of his birthplace, and pride of his race, were the strongest
points in Kenrick’s character; and Culverhouse was assuredly a home
which a man with any sense of the beautiful might be pardoned for
loving to enthusiasm. It had been a fortress in those early days
when the Danish invader was marking his conquering course along the
south-western coast with the blaze of burning villages. It had been an
abbey before the Reformation, and much that belonged to its monastic
period still remained. Some portions had been converted to secular
uses, other parts had been preserved in what might be called a state of
substantial ruin. And this mixture of ecclesiastical ruins and Tudor
dwelling-house made a most picturesque and romantic whole. The massive
outer wall of the cloistered quadrangle still remained, but where the
cloisters had been was now the rose garden--a fair expanse of velvet
turf, intersected with alleys of roses. The chapel door stood in all
its early English purity of line and moulding, but the chapel had
given place to a sunny enclosure, bounded by hedges of honeysuckle and
sweet-briar, a garden in which old-fashioned flowers grew luxuriantly
in prim box-edged beds.
The house was one of the handsomest in the county. Much too good for a
decayed race, old Sir Kenrick had always said; but young Sir Kenrick
held it as in no wise too good for him. He would not have sold it for
half a million, had he been free to sell it. The situation was perfect.
It stood in a fertile green valley, on the bank of a river which,
insignificant elsewhere, widened here to a noble reach of water, and
curved lovingly round the velvet slopes of the lawn. A long wooden
bridge spanned the river just beyond the old Gothic gateway of the
castle, and communicated with the village of Culverhouse, in which
a population of a hundred and eighty souls fancied itself a world.
Kenrick loved the place--castle, village, river--low-lying water
meadows--ancient avenues--fair green field where the foundations of the
abbey had been marked out with rows of stones--a stone for each pillar
in nave and aisles--chancel and apse--he loved all these things with
a love that was almost a passion. His heart thrilled within him when
he came back to the familiar scene after a year or more of exile. His
nature, not too warm elsewhere, warmed to the old goodies and gaffers
of Culverhouse village with an unalterable tenderness. Poor as he was,
he had always stray sixpences and shillings in his waistcoat pocket to
give these ancient rustics, for beer, or tea, or snuff. He could listen
to their stories of rheumatics and other afflictions with infinite
patience. Their very dialect was dear to him.
If Kenrick had lived in the Middle Ages, and been exposed to visible
contact with the powers of darkness, Mephistopheles would have
assuredly baited his hook with the Culverhouse estate.
‘Here are the money-bags,’ he would have said; ‘sign me this bond,
and Culverhouse is yours, free of the mortgages that now degrade and
humiliate your race. For twenty years you may reign securely in the
halls of your ancestors--and then----’
Perhaps Kenrick might have had the force of mind to refuse so frankly
diabolical a bargain, but when Mephistopheles assumed the amiable
countenance of Selina Dulcimer, and whispered in his ear, ‘Marry
Beatrix Harefield, and let her fortune revive the glory of your race,’
the young man was sorely tempted.
He had promised his cousin Cyril that he would not attempt to become
his rival, but he did not know how far Cyril’s love affair had gone. He
had no idea that Beatrix had already made her choice, irrevocably, and
was ready to sacrifice fortune and her father’s favour for her lover.
Kenrick was not in love with Beatrix Harefield, in spite of all those
hints and innuendos wherewith Mrs. Dulcimer had artfully striven to
kindle the fire of passion in his heart. He was not in love with her,
but he admired her beyond any woman he had ever met, and he could but
remember that her fortune would give him the desire of his heart. He
was above the meanness of marrying for money. He would not have sold
himself to a woman he disliked or despised, any more than he would have
sold himself to Satan. He would have accounted one bargain as base
as the other. But he would have been very glad to marry a woman with
money, provided he could think her the first of women, and worthy to
rule in the halls of his race. That he should love her was a secondary
necessity. Sir Kenrick was not a young man who considered loving and
being beloved essential to the happiness of life. Nature had made
him of colder stuff than his cousin Cyril. He could do very well
without love, but existence could hardly be tolerable to him without
Culverhouse Castle.
He thought of Beatrix Harefield as he paced the long tapestried saloon
on the evening of his arrival. He had ordered a fire to be lighted
here, though old Mrs. Mopson, the major-domo’s wife, had strongly
recommended him to sit in the library, or his mother’s morning-room.
‘You’ll be a deal snuggerer than in that there big room, Sir Kenrick,’
she urged. ‘I don’t say it’s damp, for I opens the windows every fine
morning--but it’s awful chill, and it’d take a’most a stack of logs to
warm it.’
‘Never mind the chilliness, Betty,’ said Kenrick, ‘I want to sit in
the saloon. It’s a treat to see the dear old room again after three
years’ absence.’
‘Ah,’ said Betty, ‘there ain’t another room in Hampshire ekal to it,’
firmly convinced that Hampshire was the world, or at any rate all the
world that was civilized and worth living in. Once, when somebody asked
Betty Mopson if she had ever been so far as London, she replied, ‘No,
thank God, I’m no furriner.’
So Betty lighted a pile of logs on the open hearth, and put a pair of
candles on the table near the fire, and wheeled a tapestried arm-chair
beside it, and placed Sir Kenrick’s slippers comfortably in front of
the fender--so that in spite of its long disuse the room had a homelike
aspect when he came to it after his homely dinner. By this dim light
the room looked lovely--all its shabbiness hidden--all its beauties
of form and colour intensified--the figures in the fine old tapestry
standing out in life-like roundness. Theseus and Ariadne--Ariadne
deserted--the coming of Bacchus--hymeneal festival--nymphs and satyrs
frisking against a background of blue sea.
Kenrick thought of Beatrix Harefield as he walked slowly up and down.
How well her stately beauty would become the room! how well the room
would become her! She was just the wife for the master of such a place
as Culverhouse. It seemed a hard thing that honour forbade his putting
himself forward as her suitor.
‘How do I know that she cares for Cyril?’ he asked himself; ‘and if
she does not, why should not I have my chance? Cyril is such a close
fellow. I don’t know how far things have gone between them. She may
not care a straw for him. And I may go back to India, and leave her
to be snapped up by some adventurer. I must have the matter placed on
a plainer footing when I go back to Little Yafford. If Cyril does not
mean to go in and win the prize, I must have my innings. It will be
only fair.’